The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Sunday, December 22, 2013

How WaPo’s One-Sided JSOC Infomercial Gets Colombia Wrong

Colombia is one of the largest recipients of US aid in the world ($2 billion in military and police aid, third behind Israel and Egypt; $1
billion in economic and social aid; plus $1 billion in arms sales over the last
six years).

But it’s not really on the radar in
the United States.

I think there’s a reason for that beyond the US distraction
with the Global War on Terror/Iraq/Afghanistan/Iran.It’s because some of the nastiest,
unreconstructed Cold War counterinsurgency operations in the world are
conducted in Colombia under the U.S. aegis.Death squads and the largest number of IDPs (Internally Displaced
Population) in the world (5 million!Five times the number in Sudan or the DR Congo!) matter less to the US
government than preventing the strategic and diplomatic embarrassment of
Colombia joining Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela in the ranks of left-dominated
anti-US regimes in Latin America.

Confronting the excesses of South American counterinsurgency
exemplified by Colombia is apparently a third rail that President Obama is also
unwilling to touch.Instead, the
campaign of vilification against Venezuela seems to have picked up pretty much
as it left off in the George W. Bush administration and the Colombian Free
Trade Agreement—once stalled by the seemingly unquenchable Colombian enthusiasm
for murdering labor leaders and thereby making a mockery of the “even playing
field” principle beloved by US unions—has been pushed through the Congress.

I recently wrote an article on Colombia—specifically, the
issue of whether Chiquita Brands was playing footsie with right-wing death
squads in order to keep its Colombian operations going smoothly—for the
CounterPunch monthly.Subscribe!And ask them to e-mail you my article.

So I was interested to read the Washington Post’s take on
the role of US special operations in Colombia,Covert Action in Colombia.

The article is a remarkably uncritical piece of JSOC (Joint
Special Operations Command) fist-pumping that manages to leave out a lot of
significant context.

The tenor of the piece is that JSOC special ops starting in
2003 and targeted assassinations of FARC leaders beginning in 2006 (FARC being
the leftist guerilla menace) had contributed mightily to the destabilization of
the organization and its rapidly declining insurrectionary fortunes.

By 2003, U.S. involvement in Colombia encompassed 40 U.S. agencies and 4,500
people, including contractors, all working out of the U.S. Embassy in Bogota,
then the largest U.S. embassy in the world. It stayed that way until mid-2004,
when it was surpassed by Afghanistan.

“There is no country, including Afghanistan, where we had more going on,”
said William Wood, who was U.S. ambassador to Colombia from 2003 to 2007 before
holding the same post in war-torn Afghanistan for two years after that.

Particular mention is made of the assassination of Raul
Reyes, a key FARC leader, in Ecuador, in 2008.There is, by the way, a lot of heavy breathing about the wondrous GPS-guided
smart bombs that took out Reyes; this is also the somewhat pedestrian weapon
that “accidentally” took out the intelligence directorate in the People’s
Republic of China’s embassy in Belgrade in 1999, for those of you keeping
score.

First off: from 1998 to 2003, FARC was weakened by a
ferocious campaign of white terror by the Colombian Self-Defense Forces or
AUC.Conventional Colombian forces were
hopelessly outmatched and understandably risk-averse, so in the late 1990s the
government encouraged the formation of AUC units—actually well funded and well
equipped narco-affiliated paramilitaries covertly supported by Colombian
security forces-- which fought FARC according to their own rules.The AUC saw the folly of trying to track FARC
into their jungle hideouts; instead the AUC, in counterinsurgency-speak,
decided to “drain the swamp” i.e. remove FARC’s rural support infrastructure.

“Draining the swamp” in Colombia did not involve the beau ideal of "civilized" counterinsurgency, “hearts and
minds” outreach to convince the peasants of the political, moral, and economic
folly of supporting FARC.Nor did it
involve a Colombian iteration of the “strategic hamlet” program, where the
peasants were relocated to newly-constructed villages outside of FARC’s
clutches.

Instead, the AUC would go into a village and torture and
murder suspected FARC supporters or sympathizers in the most brutal and public
manner imaginable.Individuals fled the
AUC’s fury; sometimes whole villages decamped.Pathetically, some villages announced that they were “Peace Villages”,
eschewing all contact with FARC and the AUC; at least one Peace Village was
butchered by the AUC regardless.

All this happened under the eyes of the US government, local
embassy, and CIA/DEA.Ever since the
Clinton administration, US governments had poured money into Colombian security
initiatives under the heading of “Plan Colombia”.Plan Colombia started out as a drug
interdiction program meant to wean Colombia’s farmers from coca production and
deny the countryside to narcos and FARC.It became progressively militarized and flourished even as the United
States ostentatiously condemned the brutality of the AUC (placing it on a list
of terrorist organizations in 2001).

The AUC white terror was successful, albeit in a textbook
Pyrrhic victory sort of way.FARC was
driven from the Colombian heartland, but replaced by local rightwing militias
that seized land and engaged in the usual drug trafficking, extortion, and so
on beyond the government’s reach.Even
as the AUC militias are gingerly demobilized, new militarized gangs have
replaced them in the same region.

In 2003, when Alvaro Uribe (whose father had been murdered
by FARC, and whose enthusiasm for autodefense forces and tolerance of narcos
was widely rumored while governor of Antioquia province) took office as
President of Colombia, FARC was already significantly weakened by the AUC
terror campaign.In fact, Uribe was able
to focus onthe politically dicey work of
demobilizing the AUC leadership through a carrot-and-stick campaign of threats
of prosecution and promises of amnesty (and, rather unsuccessfully, trying to
keep the AUC baddies from advertising their close links to the highest levels
of Colombia’s government, security, and legal apparatus).

This is the point at which JSOC apparently stepped up.Not quite a mopping up, but it is unlikely
that targeted killings of FARC leaders would have made as big a dent in FARC if
they had not been preceded by five years of AUC terror.A rather amusing passage in the WaPo story
depicts leadership decapitation as a brainwave that suddenly inspired the U.S.
team after previous initiatives to rescue three U.S. hostages held by FARC
proved ineffective.

Despite all the effort, the hostages’ location proved elusive. Looking for
something else to do with the new intelligence equipment and personnel, the
Bunker manager and his military deputy from the U.S. Special Operations Command
gave their people a second mission: Target the FARC leadership. This was
exactly what the CIA and JSOC had been doing against al-Qaeda on the other side
of the world. The methodology was familiar.

“There was cross-pollination both ways,” said one senior official with
access to the Bunker at the time. “We didn’t need to invent a new wheel.”

It should be pointed out, however, that the US government,
even JSOC, had already been intimately involved in Colombian security
operations—including decapitation strikes and extrajudicial killings-- for over
a decade.One of the most interesting
takeaways from Mark Bowden’s book, Killing
Pablo, is the almost comically massive intrusion of US spooks into Colombia
as part of the manhunt to track down Pablo Escobar in 1991-92.

Over a dozen U.S. agencies desperate for a post-Cold War mission
descended on Medellin to offer training and sigint in the effort to locate,
isolate, and ultimately kill Escobar.JSOC was there, Delta Force was there (led at one point by legendary “My
God is bigger than your god” hyperenthusiast Jerry Boykin).The US determined that conventional sigint
wouldn’t make a dent in Escobar’s organization if it was simply handed off to
Colombia’s corrupt and incompetent security forces; instead, it turned a blind
eye as its sigint was turned over to a special Medellin death squad of rival
narcos (and direct precursors of the AUC!) for liquidation of Escobar’s key
allies.

One of the rumors surrounding the extrajudicial execution of
Escobar (there apparently was no consideration of arresting him, given the
rickety nature of Colombian justice; he was shot as he clambered unarmed across
a rooftop) was that a Delta Force sniper took him down.

If the US team in Colombia in 2006 had to rediscover the
idea of extrajudicial murder in Iraq, they were poor students of US and local Colombian
history.

As to the targeted killing of Raul Reyes, I happened to
write extensively on this subject in 2009.Killing Reyes was something more than
taking out a nettlesome insurgent otherwise beyond the reach of Colombian
justice. Raul Reyes was the designated
FARC moderate leader; he was deep in negotiations with a European team
concerning the imminent release of Ingrid Betancourt, the famous hostage held
together with the three Americans whose coca-surveillance plane had been shot down.

A negotiated release would have brought
considerable luster to four of President Uribe’s most detested adversaries: the
meddling French, the Colombian left wing, his archenemy Hugo Chavez, and FARC
itself, which would have been legitimated as a constructive negotiating
partner.Instead, the Colombian
government located Reyes at his camp in Ecuador just across the border by
monitoring his satellite phone communications.It was rumored at the time that US signals intelligence, relying on
phone calls between Reyes and the European negotiating team or with Hugo
Chavez, pinpointed the camp so it could be plastered by the Colombian air force
with JSOC support.

In my 2009 piece I
speculated that Uribe played this risky gambit (according to the European
negotiators, the Betancourt release was a done deal and would have been
completed in a few days; indeed, they were on their way to Reyes’ camp in
Ecuador to wrap things up and they suspected that the raid was timed to kill
Reyes before they showed up) because Colombia saw the prospect of striking a
deal with Betancourt’s local captors and Uribe infinitely preferred the optics
of a daring rescue to the humiliation of a negotiated release mediated by his
political enemies.

The Betancourt “rescue” occurred four months after the Reyes
raid.It was supposedly a blindingly
clever ruse that convinced the local FARC commanders to load their hostages on
a fake Red Cross helicopter loaded with Colombian security personnel.The operation was conducted in a rather
ludicrous fashion. The hostages themselves immediately realized that the
International Red Cross would not dispatch an unmarked helicopter to ferry them
to FARC headquarters and, for that matter, that the IRC was unlikely to
dispatch representatives wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and delivering a case of
beer to the rebels, strongly implying that the complicity of the FARC
commanders in this clumsy charade was virtually mandatory.

Although the US media was, in large part, unfailingly generous
in crediting President Uribe with a brilliant and bloodless covert rescue, FARC
claimed the hostages had been sold, and the European negotiators also pitched
in with their suspicions.It was
subsequently reported that the local FARC commanders had been trying to shop
the hostages to the United States.And
their lawyers confirmed in 2013 that the local commanders had also approached
the Catholic Church as an intermediary to strike a deal.Uribe was perhaps unwilling to reveal the
actual backstory of the release in order to celebrate Colombian special forces
prowess and also dodge embarrassing questions concerning the contradictions
between his sub rosa non-negotiation strategy and its seemingly necessary
corollary, the sabotaging of negotiations (which, in addition to the killing of
Reyes apparently included stunts like holding up proof of life videos so talks
would collapse), thereby prolonging the hostages’ detention, peril, and intense
misery.

The United States under President George W. Bush was an enthusiastic
backer of President Uribe and his FARC strategy.US Southern Command provided immense
logistical support to the hunt for Betancourt and the three US hostages, and no
aid and comfort for a negotiated release.Before the liberation of the hostages, the US commitment was not
publicized; afterwards it was no secret.USSC’s Admiral Stavridis claimed on his blog at the time that his
command had expended $250 million dollars on the operation.Even when allowing for the creativity of
military bookkeeping, it is clear that impressive resources were applied to the
effort.

U.S. almost certainly provided key operational assistance—the
girlfriend of one of the local hostage-minding FARC commanders had been
arrested in the US and the US government brought in the Colombian authorities
to jointly exploit this vital leverage—and perhaps also dovetailed extradition and
incarceration strategies.Incarceration
in a US federal prison is a trump card for Colombia in dealing with FARC
guerillas and also with AUC paramilitaries.Prisoners in Colombia always have a chance of emerging from detention
thanks to amnesty; but prisoners in the United States stay
put.With remarkable even-handedness,
the United States has indicted pretty much everybody in the FARC and AUC high
commands for drug trafficking.Most
recently, the Colombian government took advantage of these indictments to whisk
away a clutch of AUC commanders who were apparently insufficiently cooperative
in fulfilling the terms of their amnesty agreement.As for the Betancourt kidnappers, they and
their stories were extradited to the United States and they haven’t been heard
from since.

In summary, it seems likely the JSOC-assisted hit on Raul
Reyes was more of a political favor to President Uribe to avoid an anticlimactic
negotiated release of Betancourt and the hostages, rather than a vital piece of
anti-terrorist derring-do.

Which makes this statement kinda dicey:

Would [the Reyes operation]
constitute an assassination, which is prohibited by U.S. law? And, “could we be
accused of engaging in an assassination, even if it is not ourselves doing it?”
said one lawyer involved.

The White House’s Office of Legal
Counsel and others finally decided that the same legal analysis they had
applied to al-Qaeda could be applied to the FARC. Killing a FARC leader would
not be an assassination because the organization posed an ongoing threat to
Colombia. Also, none of the FARC commanders could be expected to surrender.

The Washington Post article rather uncritically reports on
how great things are in Colombia thanks to JSOC:

Today, a comparison
between Colombia, with its vibrant economy and swanky Bogota social scene, and
Afghanistan might seem absurd. But a little more than a decade ago, Colombia
had the highest murder rate in the world…

It’s perhaps unkind to point out that urban Colombia has
consistently enjoyed “a vibrant economy and swanky Bogota social scene” for the
last twenty years, thanks to the eager collusion of much of Colombia’s upper
class in the nation’s narcodollar frenzy.

Certainly, thanks to the weakening of FARC, security is
better for the WaPo’s key demographic: middle class urban dwellers loath to be
kidnapped or blown up by insurgents.But
for everybody else, Colombia still has the same problems of grinding poverty
that fueled the struggle.

40% of Colombians live below the poverty line.In this case, it should be noted that the
poverty line is monthly income of $100 i.e. daily income of about $3.20.10% of Colombia’s population (the extremely
poor) makes do on $1/day.5 million in Colombia
suffered from malnutrition in 2012.Colombia’s
Gini index has worsened to 0.87 (1.0 being perfection in inequality), the
second highest in Latin America after Brazil.80% of land is owned by the top 14%, ranking Colombia 11th
worst in the world and triggering a widespread agricultural strike this summer.
According to Oxfam, a half century of civil war has alienated over 6 million
hectares of land from the hands of farmers and have fallen under the sway of
big Colombian landowners, the right wing paramilitaries, and their gangster
heirs.Thanks to the civil war, Colombia
is No. 1 in the world in Internally Displaced Population: 5.5 million (about
11% of Colombia’s population and almost 20% of the world’s population of IDPs).

In case you are interested, Venezuela, socialist hellhole,
toilet paper denier to its desperate citizens, and the focus of US fears in
Latin America, has a Gini index of 39, a poverty rate of 31.6%, and has
redistributed over 4 million hectares of farmland (perhaps 17% of the national
total) from latifundias to peasants since 2005, thereby arousing the ire of
Venezuela’s entrenched middle and upper classes (who have somehow managed to
wriggle from beneath the boot of Chavista tyranny to murder 300 agrarian
reformers over the last decade) and alienating friends of property rights
everywhere.Venezuela was recently
recognized by the UN for cutting its malnutrition rate in half.Child malnutrition in Venezuela is about 3%.It’s 12% in Colombia.

Given these numbers, it is understandable that the United
States is not all that eager to advertise Plan Colombia and, when it does, it
concentrates on the mad skillz of JSOC in killing insurgents than it does in
the ability of America’s devoted allies in the Colombian government to deliver
a decent existence to millions of its citizens.

There is hope that Colombia will grow out of its problems
and leftist insurgency, either by FARC or its successors, will wither.But the AUC and JSOC may simply have sown the
seeds for a new generation of massacre.

7 comments:

It's RAUL Reyes, not Paul Reyes. His assassination, and that of other FARC leaders, was accomplished by providing the FARC with cell phones through an informant who acted as FARC's purchasing agent. There was a criminal case about this in Washington DC, if I recall her name was alias 'Doris Adriana', or Nancy Conde Rubio.

Thanks for pointing out the flub on Raul Reyes. I'll correct it. The girlfriend and the phones were supposedly used to funnel misinformation to the captors and bait the trap for the rescue. My simpler take is that a deal to free the hostages was negotiated through the girlfriend and the phones, and then reneged on.